Sports

Skiing equipment

Well, if you insist

TED LIGETY won gold in the men’s Olympic giant slalom on February 19th, after a first run that all but routed the opposition. Practically all the American had to do on his final run, with a 1.5-second advantage, was stay on his skis and avoid being “bitten by the bear”: a blind leap named the Bear’s Brow, where several racers came to grief.

An irony not lost on Mr Ligety is that two years ago he led the charge against a change in ski specifications ordered by the Federation Internationale de Ski (FIS). That change, in the name of safety, ordered men’s giant slalom skis to be a minimum of 195cm (six feet, five inches) in length, and their carving edge to be a minimum of 35 metres (115 feet) radius. The argument is that the previous minima of 185cm and 27metres put body-wrenching forces on racing skiers as they turn, leading to more accidents and injuries.

Mr Ligety and others argued, and he still argues, that the longer, straighter skis actually demand more strength and sharper edging to make a turn. The biggest issue is the “negative effect it will have on the younger FIS racers” who are “not strong enough to handle these skis”, he said in a blog in August 2011. A year later, after using the new skis in practice, Mr Ligety noted that they took “some getting used to” but as long as the snow was hard they were “probably faster in most World Cup conditions”.

Certainly for him that turned out to be the case. During the 2012-13 season, the first in which the skis were officially used, he won five times and took a third place in six World Cup giant slaloms. This season it has been almost the same story: four victories and a third place in giant slalom, and first and second places in super-combined races, involving downhill and slalom. In March last year he explained why he thought he performed so well: “I think the new skis worked better with my technique than with most of the other guys because I start the turn earlier and finish the turn later. I have a swooping, longer arc than Marcel Hirscher of Austria…. Hirscher kind of chops off a little of the top of the turn and gets a lot of rebound (and acceleration) out of the ski. That was really easy to do on the old skis; you could really accelerate out of a turn. On the new skis, you don’t get as much acceleration.”

That personal advantage, at least a year ago, didn’t seem to soften his opposition to the changes. They “were an advantage for me, and that was a big reason I was so outspoken in criticizing them before they took effect,” he wrote in the same blog. “A rule change that determines winners and losers is a bad rule change. That was a big part of my opposition, in addition to my conviction that the FIS was wrong in its contention that reduced sidecuts would make the sport safer.”

Statistics will perhaps show who is right. Mr Ligety’s prediction, that young potential racers will shun harder-to-use skis in favour of other options such as freestyle skiing, may not be such a bad thing. But it’s unlikely to lead to fewer injuries.

Readers' comments

This phenomenom of regulation changes effecting contest outcomes is not uncommon in Winter Sports. Most notable example is Ski Jumping, where evolution of the "V-jump" in late 1980s resulted in multiple changes to the regulation that conferred advantage to one country after another and took over a decade to settle down.
These changes made the return to the podium of Noriaki Kasai of Japan (Who won Silver for Large Hill) after 20 years (He last won silver at Lillehammer 1994) all the more remarkable.